Twist and Hate: The Smearing of Paul Craig
Roberts by Joshua Frank
www.dissidentvoice.org
March 21, 2006

It
is questionable whether or not responding to the neocons’ assault on
sanity is worth the energy. They don’t take well to reason and they
certainly aren’t capable of dealing with truth. In fact, the reality in
which they dwell is a manifestation of propaganda and isolated conspiracy
theories.

Yeah, they think we
are out to get them and that we’ll destroy their comfortable way of life.
And what seems to be driving their delusional tendencies is the teaming up
of traditional conservatives, libertarians and lefties -- all of whom
oppose the neocon wars.

Take
FrontPageMag.com, which recently went after the conservative, yet
rational, Paul Craig Roberts, former contributing editor to the
National Review and the Wall Street Journal. As FrontPageMag
editor Ben Johnson wrote in disgust of Roberts’ common sense which ran in
LewRockwell.com:

Roberts has declared
the war in Iraq lost, not to mention criminal. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo
Bay are “torture centers,” and Bush would be “prosecuted” … His pessimism
about winning the War on Terror dates literally to its inception. Two days
after 9/11, Roberts wrote, “a guilt-ridden people are no match for
fanatical opponents who believe in their cause” … His writings also
seemingly justify terrorist attacks against innocent Americans, because,
like Ward Churchill, he believes there are no innocent Americans.
“Americans are complicit in the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi women
and children as ‘collateral damage,’” he writes. So what is difference
between a military target and a “complicit” family of four in Des Moines?

As if being
anti-neocon somehow implies that Roberts is also anti-American. Johnson
also distorted a recent column written by Roberts in which he relayed
several conspiracy theories passed along to him by readers which explained
how Bush might start a war with Iran.

"One of the more
extraordinary suggestions," wrote Roberts, "is that a low yield, perhaps
tactical, nuclear weapon will be exploded some distance out from a US
port. Death and destruction will be minimized, but fear and hysteria will
be maximized. Americans will be told that the ship bearing the weapon was
discovered and intercepted just in time, thanks to Bush’s illegal spying
program, and that Iran is to blame. A more powerful wave of fear and
outrage will again bind the American people to Bush, and the US media will
not report the rest of the world’s doubts of the explanation."

Now, Roberts did not
intimate that he too believed such a scenario was likely, only that the
whacko neocons are capable of just about anything. But Ben Johnson
responded:

Even on the
far-Left, such theories would be unwelcome. Although Kurt Nimmo (a critic
of DiscoverTheNetworks.org) and others have claimed for years that
Bush secretly plans to pre-emptively decimate Iran, none have publicly
claimed he would kill Americans as a pretext. The only detail Roberts
omitted was whether Bush was doing the bidding of the Freemasons, the
Illuminati, the British royal family, or the Vatican.

Clearly such
theories like the neocons’ fear that Iran is out to nuke us, as only
relayed by Roberts, not endorsed -- also border on delusional. There is no
doubt that the left has its fair share of nutcases, as anyone who has been
to a Green Party outing will likely attest. But in this case, as it so
often is with these folks, they’d rather mince Roberts’ words than deal
with the facts. Roberts never actually said he’d condone the killing of
Americans as in the case of 9/11 (neither did Ward Churchill), nor did he
claim he believed the Bush administration was likely to detonate a nuke
off the US coast in order to spark a war with Iran. The neocons are
delusional.

But now that Paul
Craig Roberts has turned against the neoconservative agenda, folks like
Johnson can’t stomach the fact that they are at last a pitiable minority.
The majority of the world hates Bush and now the majority of Americans do
too. They know their liar-in-chief fibbed his way into Iraq and they don’t
believe he’s telling the truth about Iran. And they shouldn’t.

Libertarians like
Lew Rockwell, Justin Raimondo and conservatives like Paul Craig Roberts
have joined forces with radicals like Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St.
Clair for a reason. They all oppose the Bush wars in the Middle East and
his slaughtering of civil liberties at home. They aren’t all in agreement
about market capitalism or environmental concerns, but they do see
eye-to-eye on the destructive nature of the warfare state.

Joshua Frank
edits the radical news blog
www.BrickBurner.organd is the author of Left Out! How
Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, published by Common Courage
Press (2005). Josh can be reached at:
BrickBurner@gmail.com.